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jeez, so needy

The next time a thread I make gets zero replies, I'm choosing an annoying noob "at random", allegedly, and banning it.

Oh is this guy from CoG? I guess that explains the face on that avatar. He's really been through some shit, wow.

Actually, I have been through some shit over there.  I know people here "keep it cool" by talking in a snarky, cynical way about just every topic, so I won't say more because it sounds boring even to me.  Certainly nothing worth writing a tell-all book about, but considering that we're talking about exchanging comments on a niche internet forum about stories and NOTHING ELSE, it is truly surprising how deep the craziness runs over there.

Let's just put it this way: I consider this little more than a skinned knee, but a whole bunch of people contacted me over these past few months to tell me about their experiences, and most of them boiled down to "I'm too scared to post on the forum anymore."

The whole thing is farcical in the extreme because all I wanted was a chance to re-create my childhood fun of playing IF and maybe, just maybe, somewhere down the line, cobble together something good enough to publish and ask a stranger to pay for.

Oh well, not gonna happen now! :) 

I've seen enough just from what happened to Avery in trying to publish Price of Freedom to know how insane it can get. All these sites where the mods want to quietly whisk any hint of trouble off behind closed doors and forbid any discussion of it all turn into China sooner or later, but of course Jason adds another level to it with the open tirades and singling people out for threats and abuse, which everyone just has avert their eyes from to avoid their own place on the shit list.

And I haven't really kept up so it may not be as much a problem now as before, but there was an extremely aggressive and hostile collection of users there at one point that the mods would just look away from for inexplicable reasons, they drove a lot of people into permanent lurk status or just away from the place completely.

... I am confused.

I dunno, he's one of those disgruntled CoGites that was bitching about Eiwynn's modding, so I guess he wandered over and figured he had more freedom of speech here. Which he does of course, but we'll just mock the shit out of him when he says retarded things as opposed to deleting his posts. It's more fun that way.

In any case, he's fully free to prove himself a valuable member of society despite his CoGite heritage. Unlike other IF sites, we're very inclusive.

... But I am confused what the comment "jeez, so needy" refers to and why it's amusing. (From what I can see, it's the only post he's ever made and has zero context) :p

He posted that in the Wake Word thread and then End split it off. I hadn't even realized he was somebody from CoG, but he hadn't done anything here to distinguish himself from the average dumbass noob, and I only have time for the good kind these days.

Terribly sorry I haven't posted more here since joining, but frankly, I was lying low in the weeds to get a hang of the culture here, which is a little hard to parse for me.  Also that plus I haven't yet figured out the way to write games using the CYS engine, so my preference was to put out a game first before wading in on such weighty topics as how to properly beat your child :P

Weird, I always found the CYS engine a lot more simple to use than the CoG one... Except when it comes to doing something that the engine isn't specifically designed to do, then I have to bug Miz, Berka and Killa to explain every step to me word for word like a toddler. ^_^

If there's anything specific you're having trouble with just ask on the Advanced Editor board. We have articles under Help & Info, but total beginners sometimes have trouble parsing them and do better with direct examples...or I know I did anyway.

It really all comes down to variables and IF/THEN statements as far as the logic of of it though. (Don't try to let players enter their own name because it's just not worth it, but it's easy to incorporate inventory items and so on for puzzles.)

You can make a plot focused game entirely without scripting though, some of the best stories on the site are all just pages that connect to other pages.

Price of Freedom with the skills and all that is of course the most CoG style game on the site since it was supposed to be published there, but you might check out something like Delve!, Cows vs Aliens, or Koi Koi if you're interested in ways the editor can be broken for non traditional games by someone who knows what they're doing. (All featured in Puzzles.) Tower of Rowena and Inepta Acadeny meanwhile are designed like simple parser IF games, and there's also Escape the School by Ogre11 if you want something similar to those, only excruciating to play and not any fun at all.

Then there's....several fanfics....by a brony...that also use IF navigation and skills in sort of a hybrid approach. But we prefer not to talk about those.


Forum culture can vary wildly week to week tbh, it depends a lot on who feels like effort posting vs meming vs shitposting. But I find that most users are so lazy and apathetic that it's better just to roll with any topic and be glad they're posting without assistance at all than to try and redirect. Discord has really done a number on the Lounge. Writing topics or just chatting with some level of intelligence on movies or games or books or whatever is usually safe however.

The guidelines are pretty much just

1) Don't annoy Endmaster
2) Don't be a whiny faggot
3) Try to be a FUNCTIONAL autist

So I think you'll do fine.

 

Barely important news in the matters of our Eternal War (Which is actually quiet nowadays), but from what I've heard from one of our inside sources, Siberian Sam posted a long ass rant about Jason calling him a big baby who hates his job. Sam hasn't been happy with how they do things over there unsurprisingly. (CoG and Sams don't seem to work out well)

Mentioned that Jason's misery stems from "peasant rebellions" from CYS, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. due to his tyranny over CoG.

Also called him "Daddy" for some gay reason.

Anyway, got all this second hand so I don't have a screen shot and Sam was probably too much of a fucktard to actually screenshot his post and at least post it over here for Lols. Or maybe he intends to come over here now to do just that, who knows.

If he does, he should know that calling us a bunch of fucking peasants when we clearly have our own lands, society, military and run by an enlightened ruling class wasn't the way to make allies.

But never let it be said we don't give potential second chances in case he pops up over here since he's been kicked out of the Kingdom of Faggotry.

I always like the ban reasons.

They're all for the same thing, questioning how things are run, but Jason has a bot or something apply whimsical made up explanations at random.

Yes, yes, I was thinking of taking a screencap of my post, but what's the point?  Everything that can be litigated has already been litigated ad nauseum.  

But nice to know I'm in the company of rogues here :)

 

 

Well at any rate, throwing off Jason's yoke is a sign of intelligence, good sense, and moral virtue, so I have upgraded his status in this thread accordingly.

Mucho appreciated.

Interestingly, on an unrelated note, I saw a post by Dan Fabulich over on another website just a few days ago, talking about how "he has" an active forum going on at CoG, but also that he hasn't "checked in there" for a while.

Last I looked, he's long since abandoned the Mothership, for reasons unknown, and seems completely oblivious to whatever his "partner" is up to.

Oh, btw, apparently none of you High Scions noted that I actually got fragged on CoG for calling out JSH for bitching about the financial cost of hosting the CoG forum (estimated at $5/annum) after giving a 10.000 dollar donation to the Marxists last year, which made me ROFL.  

And my exact line was "Long story short: everyone on this forum is to blame for DADDY'S BAD MOOD" which seems more or less accurate.

Did you save screenshots?
e: oh, just saw the post above. Well you're among archivists now, so do better.

Only heard this stuff paraphrased from one of our lazier informants to begin with.

When all that reddit stuff happened there was least one thread bitching about Jason over at intfiction (which was locked down immediately) so Dan has to be aware of it at least on some level.

Intfiction and the IFDB seemed to be his new stomping grounds now, although his disinterest in CoG didn't stop him from immediately banning Endmaster from the IFDB the moment he took control, unlisting all his games, and deleting his 80+ reviews on classic gamebooks and IF over some petty old grudge.

And was this the big virtue signalling donation he screenshotted and posted around everywhere when the riots were starting up?

$5 is a lot though, I know I wouldn't pay that much to keep CoG running.

Hang on, IFDB is being run by a part-owner of COG? I thought IFDB was owned by a neutral party that was just interested in creating a rating system for interactive games, is that not true? Wouldn't that be a massive conflict of interest otherwise?

As for deleting Endmaster's stuff, that just seems bizarre. Even if the owner has a petty grudge with Endmaster, his games are very popular. Those games and reviews were probably were bringing more site traffic to IFDB than Endmaster's games will lose by not being featured there.

Well, I think IFDB was owned by a neutral party, but Dan kind of wormed his way in and took over. Seems like they're trying to take over the whole IF community and CYS is pretty much the only safe haven left. :(

That's really too bad. Online internet fiction users deserve an unbiased review site, but from what I've heard nearly every platform has its own unique problems. At least CYS remains uninfiltrated. :)

HOA-type karens and the brainwashed PC libtarded hate them! Find out how this online writing community became a bastion of actual free speech and based conduct without tolerance for faggotry in just a few simple steps!

"It's amazing what words on a screen can do to sensitive bitches all over the world." - a cystian

"I was psychologically tortured by having End make thousands of good reviews and improve the quality of the website I frequent. Luckily I'm an admin of the dead writing community so I can just wipe anything I don't like out of my sight." - boomer fag at IFDB

"I'd let End fuck my wife, but she's busy with other men right now." - Jason, a known cogite.

"I'll pass on the wife. Your Mom sends her love though." - Endmaster.

Seems legitimate! Please, take my social security number!

Oh, Ford already has it.

078-05-1120

Ooh, I can answer this one!

He's in a team called the IFTF that has taken over ownership of the IFDB. Consisting of zarf, mathbrush, and nine other men who I don't recognize at all. It's not clear what, if anything, any of the rest of them do as they don't appear to be active anywhere in the community. (Their site is also very unclear because it shows smiling pictures of women and BIPOCS, but the "active members" if you look further are just a list of a dozen very white sounding men with no further information.)

But Fabulich (according to Fabulich) doesn't control the IFDB, he only hosts it on his server and decides what updates there will be, who can and cannot use the database, what games it will contain, how popular said games are allowed to become, and so on.

There are CoG games listed on it, and I don't believe any CoG author or reviewer will ever be shadow banned for having a game become too popular. I've seen positive reviews for games from other commercial companies deleted however. In fact I have a theory this could be the real reason behind the bans. Dan in another post called Endmaster a "demagogue" and pretending like games being linked from this forum and getting a dozen ratings from people who had played it was some panic inducing upset to the whole system that needed to be dealt with. But Endmaster was right at that time getting himself onto the Top Reviewer list by reviewing commercial games from companies that weren't CoG. One of them, Untold, was reviewed by Mizal too, and linked in the Untold discord while I was in there with over a thousand other players.

Instant deletion and ban by Dan, she had the apologize to everyone just a couple of hours later.

I made a post in a relevant topic on the Intfiction board trying to delicately bring up the fact that the IFDB needed to be better prepared for authors with popular games and many fans, now that the new management seemed intent on policing the entire internet. (Linking a game from a Twitter or anywhere and asking fans who have already played it to rate it under the current policy is literally a bannable offense....time will tell if that applies to CoG games as well.)

Oh and my post was immediately split off from the thread, given the generic name 'IFDB feedback' and allowed to sink out of sight. Despute directly responding to several statements other posters made and questions raised, it was "off topic."

This is a lot of speculation of course but I really think Fabulich saw this archive built over many years by the true fans, and decided to just step in and reshape it to his own ends. It becoming equally a way to showcase games from other companies would go against that and had to be stopped.

Dan Fabulich is not a man who really cares about IF or respects the community, that much is obvious from the fact he deleted so many reviews, (and Endmaster's and mizal's are only the ones that we know of so far, because they had a place they were allowed to speak about it) simply for being written by someone he doesn't like. So what can his motivations be at that point?

My account over there can actually be banned for posting this here by the way. A rule was added preventing insulting "past or present IF authors" anywhere on the internet, seemingly entirely to keep CYS and Tumblr and reddit users away.

On the Intfiction board I should point out that you don't have to look very far to find members espousing leftist ideals--they've even banned games from "preaching anti-communism". But they let this man who's only interest in what used to be an entirely indie company is monetary just step in and take over everything.

This is just all so bizarre. In any other medium, a company owner owning a review site would be considered a MASSIVE conflict of interest. I already knew that COG had some really weird and dumb rules (I've skimmed a few of the history threads), but I always figured they were just shooting themselves in the foot by driving users away from their site. This IFDB thing is different though, because it's considered a reputable site by people who want nothing to do with COG. And, this deletion and stifling of games and reviews has a negative impact on users who are just trying to find some good games. It's hard to believe people can get so petty over a meaningless internet empire.

Are there any other reputable unbiased internet fiction review websites? It's the internet, so it's not like they can control everything. It would be too bad if the majority of the online interactive fiction community was stuck with IFDB.

I have hosting and domain for a textadventures.xyz all paid up for a year. I just need to approach someone about actually making the site, and a neutral archive with all the same functionality could be available again for anyone to use.

It's just more complex than the typical thing someone might throw together with WordPress, so I have to interview random Iranians on Fiverr and take my chances there. I'd started to look into it a few months ago, but then my dad spent some time in the hospital and I started a new job and it all just got put on the back burner.

Having an unbiased review site would be great! I hope your dad is feeling better.

Me too. Really sorry to hear that Miz.

Thanks, but this was back in April and he's fine now. He apparently just thought he'd celebrate becoming officially a senior citizen by ignoring pneumonia for a week, and then there were some complications which mostly happened because he insisted that they let him out earlier than they should have the first time.

My Dad's like that about going to the doctor... And people wonder why women live longer. :p

Excellent rant and pretty good sum up, this is why you're my favorite depressed smut writer. It's hard to say what really happened of course, but it doesn't seem to me the bans were that strategic though, I think Dan was just being a cunt, probably with some encouragement from Hanon.

Could have been a factor though, who knows. At least End kept backups of his reviews, and I'm not too upset about mine since most were just a few paragraphs of impressions and not anything especially high effort.

I keep wanting to ask for a summary of the IFDB fiasco, but never wanted to make a thread just for that. I know the basics, obviously bans of productive members happened with no good reason, reviews were deleted out of spite and all CYS members became second class citizens treated like criminals over there, but there was other stuff I've seen like mentions of Discord trolling. I remember seeing screenshots of some really longwinded guy lecturing Mizal, and what is Mathbrush's roll in all this? There were other people getting reviews deleted too, weren't there?

I'm intending to have a long career of writing IF, both CYS stories and simulation games with Adrift and maybe even other programs, and I want to be able to explain this all clearly if anyone asks why I want nothing to do with the IFDB or anyone involved with it.

 

Funnily I've realized this means I'll have to make a seperate account there just to take my own games down if someone adds them against my wishes.

 

Your interest has been noted, but right now I am tired from work, End is still working, and everyone else is lazy.

@eatyourveggies

Here, but you pretty much know the gist of it.

Hannon is probably the longwinded guy you're talking about that was speaking to Mizal. Much like all the IFaggots over there, he's pretty much a coward that back peddles and uses a lot of weasle words to try to support weak arguments.

An example of this was just banning me and Mizal for no reason other than someone MIGHT bitch about us at some later time. Nevermind the fact that he never confronted either of us about this. Just sort of did it and I found out like a month later when I tried to log into the IF forums.

While he spoke to Mizal later after she confronted him, he never confronted me at all. Which is pretty much standard operating procedure over there when dealing with me.

Fast forward to a couple months later and apparently I find out my stories have been put on the IFDB by someone. (Still don't know who the hell that person is) Mathbrush did a review of Eternal which all things considered wasn't really a bad one. I mean he's a Mormon that reads with a language filter, it's amazing he even played through several endings and gave it an okay score.

Amusingly half of this "review" was going on about the CYS site itself, most of which were wrong assumptions. How we had a school shooter story category, we push the boundaries with RAEP, call people "slurs" on the forums, etc.

Of course cue the faggot peanut gallery that chime in with a bunch of baseless comments. Also I'm getting stories rated down with NO review at all for whatever reason.

At this point I wasn't banned from the IFDB (Didn't even have an account) but since they obviously had gotten our attention, we started making accounts there and rating/reviewing stuff.

The IFDB at this point was a old bloated archive which actually had very few reviews of consequence. Most of the reviews there are several years old. They aren't getting any new insights on anything. The status quo "royalty" have been sitting there doing fuck all for the most part.

Enter the CYStians who started actually writing reviews and ratings infusing a much needed new perspective over there. I wrote 80 detailed reviews for various games on there with no bullshit and were perfectly wholesome as far as content. I was adding reviews for games that didn't even have fucking reviews. Hell, I was adding games to the database that should have been on there a long time ago.

Of course I'm moving up their little "status ranking" fucking up the status quo on the IFDB because, gee guess what? I'm actually DOING something IF related, rather than worrying about if someone is saying "mean words" on the internet.

It all came to a head, when Dan took complete control over the IFDB. Dan Fagubitch hasn't liked me ever since he came to me years ago demanding I take down some thread over here. Yeah, fuck off. This place isn't the IF Forums and you're not going to dictate shit here.

Dan, Hannon, and the rest of those faggots rewrote a bunch of rules just to get rid of me, when it probably would have been more honest to not bother with the rule rewrite and just ban for not liking me.

The "official" reason is some dumb reason is "You're not supposed to tell people to rate your stories/reviews up!"

Well why the fuck not? Hey it's not my fault I actually interact with people who also actually like my stuff enough to rate it up anyway. (And hell, not everyone was doing it either) You're going to punish me for being popular? Lol.

I suspect though the real "official" reason is the other dumb rule about "You can't say mean things about people on other sites, it's not creating an inclusive environment!"

Go fuck yourself, seriously.

First of all, nobody at IF was getting "harasssed" "doxxed" or whatever the fuck. Nobody here (Least of all me) got time for that shit.

Second of all, the ONLY people that were getting called "mean names" were the ones who'd started acting like faggots towards us in the first place. (People that y'know, ban others without any sort of explanation and hope nobody notices)

Third, and this is probably the most telling, I honestly don't know ANY of those faggots in the "IF community" and if I don't know them, I'm hardly "high profile" over there so how am I exactly this "big threat?" Yes, we already established I was fucking up the status quo, hence how I was a threat to the system in place, but that's not really the "community" as a whole like they're trying to claim. In essence they were just saving their own asses.

They have all their little in jokes from the 1990s and think it's the funniest shit ever, which I guess you had to be there or something. Really not impressed with any of the "heavy hitters" over there and there were a few reviews where I even sort of dismissed some of the "in jokes" that were in some game. Probably wounded a few egos on that one since I started getting "downvotes" on the reviews.

For whatever reason they banned Mizal before they even banned me. I'm going to guess they figured as one of the CYS leaders, they needed to get rid of her. Honestly though, she really wasn't doing anything. Of course I wasn't doing anything either, except showing how pathetic they all are due to my awesomeness.

As for my banning from the IFDB, I'm sure it was a group faggotry decision, but I figure it was Dan who urged it the most especially since I had gotten banned from CoG for "off site harassment" like a few days before.

I wasn't completely surprised of course since I figured it was coming as soon as Dan was talking about "Oh we gotta do something about mass upvotes." I probably would have been more surprised had they actually used common sense and thought:

"Hey y'know I don't really agree with this End Master fellow's views on certain things, but he's provided a lot of good stuff for the archive. He seems to know how to act in a civilized manner and the IFDB sure could use actual quality material on it, because everyone knows the only person that's providing any reviews on it lately is that cuck Mathbrush that we pat on the head every once in awhile. Let's allow End to provide more reviews and others from CYS will add more too since they all seem follow his lead and it'll be a net positive for everyone. In time, it might even calm heated attitudes towards each other."

But then again that's expecting a bit too much intelligence from a bunch of fucktards.

I also imagine there was this minor "hope" that maybe they could get rid of me and Mizal and keep the rest of the CYS members that had accounts to add reviews. Basically get "new blood" without the "trouble makers" The old divide and conquer trick. Lol yeah right!

Seriously, without me or especially Mizal, nobody here is going to be motivated to do reviews over at IFDB. Mizal has to put you lot to the lash just to review stuff here, let alone elsewhere. I think they thought Ogre was going to be the "face" of CYS, but he lost interest just like everyone else after we got banned. (Hell, I think he lost interest before then)

"I really believe CYS has much to offer to the IFDB." - Mathbrush

LOL

And since you asked about Math, I'll mention his role in all this and that's he doesn't really have one other than whipped dog of the IFaggots.

He was arguably the "bravest" one of the lot since he actually made an account here and spoke to Mizal several times. I even spoke to him a couple times. All interactions were civil.

However when the shit went down, he emulated his IF masters, sat back and cowardly lurked without confronting either of us. He popped up here a few times after the banning, but never said shit. He's disappeared completely since then. My opinion of him is actually lower than when he started out with his review of Eternal.

Someone already said it, but the whole "shutting me out" thing over there doesn't do too much to me since I went YEARS without even being on the IFDB in the first place. They're the ones that are depriving the IF community of valuable content due to their fucktardery.

Anyway, that's about it. Mizal can probably elaborate on other stuff and there's more about all this in one of the HATE threads.

Thank you for the detailed explanation! 

I can't understand their motivations at all, hate and spite is the only thing that makes sense seeing they harmed their own community to do this, and did nothing to ours but provide more gossip material. I really am sorry you lost your reviews though since I know it had to take a long time to write those to help others, just to have the mods come in and decided to punish you and the authors both.

I'm still upset whenever I think about your games too. Not that you need a handful of ratings from the IFDB when you have thousands of them here, but what Dan or whoever did was a slap in the face to everyone. What they did was as good as personally calling everyone who rated the game a liar acting in bad faith, and that's the thing I keep coming back to with this.

I think when I do start finishing my games I'm going to put a disclaimer telling people NOT to rate them over there if it winds up listed there somehow, because Dan will automatically consider them criminals just for playing a game and giving the opinion on it.

I'm also glad mizal said people can talk about any kinds of games here, because it proves that we are welcoming to all and we don't treat authors from other communities the way their mods treated us.

I have to say, this disturbs me more than anything that happened to me personally.  After all, it's one thing for CoG to exercise censorship on their own site.  But who gives these people the right to delete reviews from a third-party site?  That's crazy.

I truly do feel sorry for anyone, not just the "heads" of CoG, who wakes up every single day, blaming all of their problems on somebody else.  That's no way to live your life, people!

That is truly insane.  How is it possible that just two people have gained such enormous influence over the IF community??

Forgot I never replied to this. End already covered most of it, but the Discord stuff was a separate incident that only became relevant indirectly. There was an author going by MotherTAV, who for unexplained reasons (because none of these people can EVER communicate) went on some personal crusade against the site. They got some friends together, or alts, whatever, and did some half assed trolling of all three of the discord servers I had at the time and made a few spammy threads here on the forum. They also ratings bombed all the CYS games on the IFDB, which were about 30 at the time from one of my previous failed attempt to get people here interested in other IF sites.

They got Hanon in on this somehow, and while they were in the Discord they got some random screenshot of us joking about executing a slime girl with soap (don't look that up, it's a hentai thing connected with rape/suffocation fetishes....for whatever reason that side of the IF community attracts a lot of people super into rape, and their uh, interests are well protected over there) and Hanon, I guess, being desperate, stretched that into an IRL threat against another IF author and used it as an excuse to ban us from the Intfiction forum. Not even mentioning this to us of course, despite having also joined the Discord servers for this purpose and having just as much access to the forum here as anyone. Amusingly, as part of this, in an effort to feel legitimized he wrote an entire new rule over there, that now requires them to police the entire internet for mean words that could maybe, possibly be in reference to any IF author, past or present.

The thing is, nobody here actually used Intfiction, and it took me about three months to notice my account was banned and from there piece together what had happened, and that's where the seven full phone screens you saw of Hanon's condescending faggotry came from.

It's only really relevant for the whole thing making me remember we had some CYS games on the IFDB, and giving me some material to use in encouraging this lot here to list more. (Even though ultimately it was this mysterious IFDB user named Zape that did most of the work there.)

Once we finally had 'site honor' as a little motivation, several users here easily broke into the top 100 reviewers list over there and many many CYS games were listed, sort of taking over the main page in a way that they apparently saw as a threat. All the active CYS mod staff eventually got targeted for increasingly vague reasons, it wasn't just me and Endmaster. Just everyone else pretty much stopped paying attention after that, there was no point to using the site to write reviews or list games (the entire purpose of the site) once they started deleting reviews and unlisting games.

But yeah, I flip flop back and forth on which I dislike more sometimes, but this is a Jason thread so let's keep the hate focused there.

Dan is a massive cunt and symbolic of much that's gone wrong with the IF community, but CoG at least would be in a much better place if he were running things there and not Jason. At least Dan knows how to fucking restrain himself and speak civilly when it's required, Jason seems to be in a constant state of shitting in his hands and flinging it at the people trying to give him their money.

Dan/Jason/IF/CoG; they're all are pretty much the same interchangable umbrella of retarded faggotry as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, thanks for the update and enjoy your time here.

Yah, you know the funny thing is that yesterday, when I wrote my little jimmy of a post on CoG, I did sit there for a minute and ask myself "Should I take a screenshot of this?"  But I said, "Nah" because drama isn't much my thing.  I said my piece, and the chips were gonna fall when they were gonna fall.

Frankly, I'm probably aware of only 1% of what the CoG founders have been up to, but the bright, Las Vegas-style neon message coming through over there is that neither DF nor JSH actually like what they do for a living.  Which seems really strange, coming from an outside perspective, because why not just sell it or move on?  

I guess I'm quite naive, as I imagined that it was a 1970s-1984 Atari type situation in which everyone who gets to work on cool games actually is THRILLED to be paid to work on cool, fun games.  But all I ever see out of the CoG heads is "I'm sick of the fans, and I hate fucking reading IF."  Which considering what a tiny niche it is, seems even more of a head-scratcher.  

What prompted my death sentence was a thread about some poor soul who wanted to post a thread on a WIP (Work-in-Progress) he or she was writing using a different format than CoG.  And JSH went ballistic saying something to the effect of "This forum costs way too much money to run, so no way in hell am I gonna allow a non-CoG WIP thread on my site."

A few other folks then timidly suggested, for what felt like the millionth time, that since CoG was kinda integral to the IF world, and pretty darn rare in that it's been a profitable business for a decade, the company could maybe, possibly, think about stepping up to the plate and take a bigger, long-run view of the situation, which is to say that being welcoming and embracing diversity would actually make the company money, and if not, at least garner a little respect and admiration amongst the fan base, a huge percentage of which are clueless kids who have no idea whatsoever about all the inside baseball stuff and just want a place to hang out and talk about their favorite romanceable character in a story.

And that's when JSH started whining about how gosh darn expensive operating the forum was, which is run on open-source free software (called Discourse).  That made my bullshit meter ping because this is the same CoG gave Patrice Marxist Cullors ten thousand Simoleons last year, so I highly doubt that a $5/year hosting fee moderated by volunteers was in danger of bankrupting the company.  

I then pointed out, rather succinctly if I do say so myself, that JSH was exhibiting all the signs of an abusive parent who perennially blames his kids for exacerbating his post-bender migraines, and that maybe, just maybe, if he's spent years complaining that the FANS (which, let's not forget, are responsible for providing most of his income) are all assholes, then he clearly isn't happy and really ought to find something else to do with his life.

Obviously, telling the truth made his migraines worse :P but so be it.  One day, he'll be sitting there in some shrink's office with tears down his face realizing he threw away his life arguing with teenyboppers over how to properly manage a subreddit, ffs.

You know what's really weird? There used to be a Category over on the COG forums specifically dedicated to talking about non CoG related Interactive Fiction... I guess they scrapped that category since the last time I was there and decided, "If it's not making us money, you're not allowed to talk about it."

This was the only story worth talking about over there anyway.

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/eternal-completed/1794

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/eternal-chooseyourstory-game-mature-content/645

Surprised those threads are still there to be honest. Nowadays you'd probably get a 1000 year long ban just for mentioning that Eternal exists.

He who shall not be named!

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/whos-heard-of-endmaster-in-chooseyourstory/230

I feel like I should have one of those little horror nursery rhymes at this point.

I like how the topic became how depressed they were getting from reading death song within just a few posts. And that was back in '11, when the internet was supposed to be infinitely more resilient than the crybabies that are around now.

Yeah, the pussies! I totally didn't cry from reading Death Song... Nope... No tears here... ... ... :'(

Ah well, you couldn't help it being born with the woman's sensibility

Never thought I'd see EndMaster's games accused of being too linear. :p

Too linear AKA "This story won't let me be a tranny."

Okay here's a consolidation of Sam's final days on CoG. Sort of an interesting thread with the usual Jason tyranny along with Haverstone bootlicking as expected.

Link!

And for the lazy, I have my CYStian fellows covered for screenshots of the best bits. (The rest is just the usual Jason/CoG company bootlicking)

There you go folks, enjoy.

(Mizal to the rescue with better style tags again.)

But oh man every time I see blinding white Discourse screenshots around here I know I'm in for a treat, I shall have to peruse these a bit later.

Seriously though, I don't get why so many people have a problem with Jason. He seems like such a nice guy.

Good grief. How did Sam Ursu possibly get banned for that? I see nothing here other than a polite and eloquently phrased explanation of a genuine complaint. He was just banned for... saying something Jason didn't like? Everything I hear about COG just gets more and more wild.

What baffles me most about this, is that this isn't even good business sense. It's not too much of a surprise that a power-tripping company leader tries to turn every single aspect of his website into profit at the expense of his customers. But surely Jason can see that having an open and diverse range of forum topics would only attract more people to the website, and thus, attract more people to purchase games? This is just so bizarre.

My favourite line is, "If you're not publishing in CS, you're making use of the resource that is this community without contributing to it's maintenance. And frankly, I don't have time for that." ... So I guess all the fans who come to the site because they like to read and review stuff can go fuck themselves?

With this way of thinking, CYS would be dead by tomorrow.

I'm not exactly sure why CoG bothers to have a forum at this point. Might as well just shut it down and have the site just advertise what new games are coming out and what's available and direct everyone to the CoG reddits to talk.

Of course there won't be much discussion over there either. Lol.

With that attitude, it's just so weird that he still has a functional business and people willing to buy his games. Maybe the internet IF market just doesn't have a lot of other options for authors who want to be paid.

It has pretty much 0 other options. >.<

It's the best option for authors that don't want to do anything but make a storygame and hand it over and forget about it, but I wouldn't say there aren't any others. It's debatable whether anyone really needs a company at all when what they do is ultimately pretty simple...shoveling other people's work out on Google Play isn't a mystical art. And if nothing else there's always itch.

Oh, that's good news. I'm glad people have other options.

Thank you!

That's exactly what I asked myself as well.  However, I don't think we'll ever get any real answers to that question.

Nonetheless, I am somewhat perversely proud that, after being on the internet full-time since 1992, I have now become a "troll" for the very first time. Might as well call me a "combat ace" and a "gold medal Olympian" too, if we're making things up :)

One time when I was five, the other IF communities touched my penis.

Considering the high degenerate population of the other IF sites that's not too surprising.